1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the area of communication. Specifically, the present invention relates to method and system for synchronizing personal contact information from different sources and mechanisms for registered users to keep back checking their private journals and chatting with others via short messaging. Based on the architecture, other features including proof delivery of emails, recycling of deleted contacts, a “black” list, contact relationship levels and anonymous email and short messaging are provided.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is estimated that an average person with some education background has about four email accounts. Examples of these email accounts include an email account from work, an account from a residential ISP, and several free email accounts from, e.g., AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail, each of the accounts established for its own purpose. For example, the email account from work is often used to communicate with other co-workers at work. The account from the residential ISP (e.g., AT&T) may be a serious account to communicate with friends and family members while other accounts may be used for other leisure or purchasing activities. Each account, however, is configured to maintain its own address book to facilitate an account holder to send emails to others without repeatedly entering an email address. Regardless of how many accounts a user has, each address book in an email account is independently managed. If a person happens to be on a business trip and could not access his work account, he could use his other email accounts that may be readily accessed to communicate with his co-workers. However, the person must remember the email address of his co-workers.
Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express is the most popular email application being used to receive emails from several accounts. It also provides an address book that saves emails addresses when a user sends emails out from Outlook or Outlook Express and manually enters the email addresses. However, Outlook or Outlook Express is often running on a personal computer. When a user is away from the personal computer, the access to the consolidated address becomes difficult. Again, the user has the difficulty to access his address book while away from the personal computer.
Similarly, many people have at least one portable device. For example, a cellular phone allows a user to create an address book that nevertheless is often used to remember a phone number. When a call comes in, the cellular phone allows the user to update the address book with the phone number of the call without actually entering the numbers, all the user needs to do is to enter a contact name for the number. Some other people may also carry a PDA that again is equipped with an address book, recording contact information of others being connected through the device. The dilemma is that the contact information of a person is distributed among several devices or accounts. When a user needs to contact the person by phone, unless the phone used to contact the person before is readily handy, the user has no other way to retrieve the phone number. Likewise, if the user needs to contact the person by email from an account other than the account he normally uses to communicate with the person, he would have no other way to retrieve the email address of the person, unless he remembers or has to make a call to ask the email address.
Technologies have been advanced to the point that people can communicate with others in different ways with different devices/tools. However, due to the lack of coordination among the different ways and different devices/tools, from one perspective, our life is technically complicated. There is thus a need for solutions that can simplify our technically complicated life, for example, one can access contact information from anywhere anytime. If one changes his contact information (e.g., due to job change, phone number change or email change), unless he updates all of his contacts of the change, there would be a possibility that the person may have lost contact with some of his contacts forever. Thus there is a further need for a mechanism that allows a change to be made in a way that all his contacts are immediately updated of the change. To further facilitate communications with or among the contacts, there is yet another need for solutions that keep the communications with or among contacts alive, secured and as often as possible.